Speaking in Code

Keeping secrets is probably a good habit for a spy agency, but then it leads
to e-mail like this, an internal memo from the National Security Agency
announcing that it is okay to use the word "ZARF" -- without divulging what
it means.

Steven Aftergood received this redacted memo through a Freedom of Information
Act request (in other words, the NSA declassified a code word without telling
anybody). Aftergood doesn't work for the NSA; he's director of the
Project on Government Secrecy
at the Federation of American Scientists. He believes the agency took
this step not to reflect the values of an open and democratic society, but
to make it easier for non-ZARF-cleared people, such as secretaries, to push
paper on which the word appeared. He also has a theory on the meaning of
ZARF. He ran the word through the AltaVista search engine on the Web and
got a lot of hits. Most of them were in Turkish -- a language in which "zarf"
means "receptacle" or "envelope" -- but a few were Air Force references to
a project on computer multi-tasking. His theory is that the NSA is researching
ways to defeat other people's computer security systems -- "unless there
are two government Project ZARFs."